Yes, things like honour and anger serve important signalling and game-theoretic functions. But they also come to be valued intrinsically (the same way people like sex, rather than just wanting to spread their genes), and strongly valued. This makes it hard to agree that “oh, your sacred core value is only in the service of this hidden objective, so we can focus on that instead”.
I certainly agree that we’d probably have a hard time convincing someone from the past to be able to understand that.
I hope for myself, and my cohort generally, that we’d be able to rise above the level of being attached to something that doesn’t actually matter, and sacrifice superficial values for what we care most about
Yes, things like honour and anger serve important signalling and game-theoretic functions. But they also come to be valued intrinsically (the same way people like sex, rather than just wanting to spread their genes), and strongly valued. This makes it hard to agree that “oh, your sacred core value is only in the service of this hidden objective, so we can focus on that instead”.
I certainly agree that we’d probably have a hard time convincing someone from the past to be able to understand that.
I hope for myself, and my cohort generally, that we’d be able to rise above the level of being attached to something that doesn’t actually matter, and sacrifice superficial values for what we care most about